NCAA president on realignment, full cost of attendance, APR, mafia comparisons and more

NCAA president Mark Emmert was in town on Thursday to speak to the Houston Economics Club at its monthly meeting at the Federal Reserve Bank. Emmert, who has been the NCAA’s president since October 2010, covered a myriad of topics in his speech. Afterward, he had a 12-minute interview session with local media. Here’s the full Q-and-A and below that, some excerpts from his speech:

Q: What’s the difference between perception and reality in the new “full cost of attendance” athletic scholarship legislation?

NCAA president Mark Emmert addressed several topics in his speech to the Houston Economics Club and in an interview session with media (Michael Conroy/AP)

Emmert: This has created a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. There are people that see the increase in the size of that scholarship as ‘pay-for-play.’ The fact is that every college, for all of their students, has something that’s described as the ‘full cost of attendance.’ That’s just a number that they create that includes tuition, fees, room, board, books and supplies and then travel costs, and clothing costs and miscellaneous expenses and all of that. Today, a student-athlete grant-in-aid or scholarship adds up to tuition, fees, room and board and books but doesn’t cover all of those other pieces. So at most schools there’s always a gap and that’s the gap between the size of the scholarship and the full cost of attendance. What the NCAA has approved now is that conferences and schools, if they want to, can close some of that gap — they were never allowed to (before), it was against the rules — they’re allowed to close some of that gap up to $2,000 as long as that doesn’t exceed the full cost of attendance. So the money is just for covering their legitimate documented education expenses. Not for pay for playing a game, it’s still part of their scholarship. That scholarship model has been the same for 40 years, and so it seemed appropriate that this is a time to change it and to cover some of the cost differential for students because what’s happened in those 40 years is that the time commitments of student-athletes has grown dramatically. It used to be that, 20 or 30 years ago, that you could be a football player, a baseball player and you could still have time for a summer job and you could do all the things that a normal student does. For a football player today for example, it’s pretty darn hard to do all that there or for a basketball player. They’re in summer school, they’re working out all the time; it’s pretty much a full-time commitment. So this opportunity allows the closing of that gap in the legitimate costs of education, but not paying someone to play sports.

Q: What’s your expectation on how many schools will do that?

Emmert: I think the majority of the Division I FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision) schools will do that but that’s going to be up to individual conferences.

Q: Do you see that being a challenge for institutions with lower budgets for athletics?

Emmert: Sure, they’re going to have to make decisions whether or not they want to go in that direction. I think again, the majority of them will decide to do it, at least partially, but those are local decisions as they should be, just like the pay of a coach should be.

Q: Is there a concern that the measure will widen the gap between the haves and have nots in college athletics?

Emmert: Well the gap right now is pretty enormous. If you look at the lowest-resourced conference, they spend about $40,000 per year per student athlete, for all costs in. The SEC (Southeastern Conference) at the top spends roughly four times that, so (about $150,000) per student. So if you’ve got a gap between $40,000 and a $150,000 (then) $2,000 isn’t going to make much of a difference.

Q: What are your biggest concerns in regards to conference realignment?

Emmert: My concerns about the whole realignment issues aren’t that there’s realignment going on; that’s fine. Schools need to have the ability to pick where they’re going to be as a conference and who they want as their conference teammates but at the same time, I want to make sure — and I’ve been encouraging presidents in particular — to be as thoughtful and careful about those decisions as they can be. They’ve got to look at more than just the bottom line and the presidents are but the fact is, that you’ve got to look at what does this really mean for student-athletes. If you’re flying them halfway across the country to play a mid-week volleyball game and they’ve got to be back in class the next day at nine o’clock, what’s the realities of that? What are the realities of the cost of flying teams all over the country and does that eliminate any economic advantage of being a part of that conference? Are they making the decisions because they’ve got good information because of what’s really going on, or are they doing it out of fear and reactiveness and concern about what may happen somewhere else rather than what’s really going on? As long as the process is thoughtful, deliberative and keeps focus on what student-athletes, how they’re being affected, then they can do what they want to do. My job is to look at intercollegiate athletics as a whole and remind them that they need to be attentive to those things.

Q: Are the student-athletes’ best interests being kept in mind or is it just a money grab?

Emmert: I don’t think that’s entirely right. If you look at a lot of the movement that’s occurred, it hasn’t really shifted the geographic mix very much, A&M moving into the SEC for example, that’s really not a big problem. You’ve got the University of Washington traveling to UCLA on a regular basis, and that’s I don’t know how many miles, over 1,000 miles I suppose. So for A&M to travel to Starkville, Mississippi, isn’t a big travel. In many of these moves, I don’t think it’s going be a problem for student-athletes and for some it could be. We’ll have to wait and see what the real facts are when it all shakes out. I would encourage people to look at what’s really happening. In some cases, the conversation is a lot more dramatic than the realities. There was a conversation about Texas and everybody going to the Pac-12, but of course, they didn’t. They just had conversations.

Emmert: Well obviously he doesn’t know the good that we do and the service that we provide. I don’t know how anyone can make a comment like that when they know that we provide $2 billion worth of financial support to students, that we have graduation rates ahead of non-athletes, that there’s 400,000 young men and women getting to play the sports they love because of us. If that’s the definition of the mafia, it’s a peculiar definition.

Q: Why was the decision made to allow unlimited phone calls and text messages to men’s basketball recruits starting in June of a recruit’s sophomore year?

Emmert: There’s a number of challenges in men’s basketball recruiting and everybody’s pretty well documented them. A big piece of that is during the summer now, prospective student-athletes are engaged in tournaments and working with a lot of third parties, most of which are fine and that works really well and good but it’s also how a lot of the negative third-party influences come to bear. We wanted to provide coaches with an opportunity to get access to student-athletes earlier, so they can build relationships, so the student can decide more based on real knowledge of the coach and vice versa so they don’t just know each other from a handshake and a few voice messages and let them really build strong relationships. And then the same thing with summer contact with current students. So right now the coaches can’t interact with their own players during the summer. Well we want them interacting with their players. The coaches are almost always very positive influences in the lives of these kids. And then when you add to it the new academic standards, the coaches have a vested interest in making sure they’re going to class in the summer if they’re in summer school, that they’re engaged and they’re doing the right things. So I think and obviously the board agrees with me that having more contact between coaches and players is a positive thing.

Q: What have been the biggest concerns expressed to you in the way the Academic Progress Rate standards are enforced?

Emmert: The APR is generally very well embraced as a good measure of how student-athletes are doing in the classroom. That’s been a really nice shift. Ten years ago you would not have asked that question. Ten years ago, the media and the world out there had no way of measuring how a school or a team was doing in the classroom. Now, we’ve got this benchmark. It’s not a perfect measure, there is no perfect measure, but it’s a good one and it gives us all something to pay attention to. Now, with the academic requirements with participation in tournaments, you’re going to be watching it even more. Because all of a sudden (people will ask), ‘Wow, is that team going to be able to get into a bowl game next year?’ because of their school work, not because of their play. I think that’s an incredibly positive development. People are worried about not the number, they’re worried about the transition, is it going to be too fast? Will they get time to adjust? That’s an issue that people are raising. There’s some concern about the raising of initial eligibility standards. Will kids be able to go play? We said here’s the new academic requirements for competition, but not for getting scholarships. The current academic standards are still in place for going to school and getting your scholarship support, but not for competition. So we have an academic redshirt model, if you will. So it won’t deny access to college but it will mean you’ve got to get in there and you’ve got to demonstrate that you’re going to be a good student and then you can play, but until then you can’t travel and you can’t play with the team.

Q: Is there a concern that with the full cost of attendance measure, that it’ll be a recruiting advantage for schools that do it as opposed to those who don’t?

Emmert: First of all, the real competitive equity, if you will, where’s the competitive fairness in of all of this? It’s predominantly inside of a conference. Every team wants to win their conference and they see their competitors as their conference competitors. So this rule that was just passed is to be decided upon at the conference level, not at the individual school level. So if Conference USA says ‘We’re going to do this and everybody’s going to do it,’ then it will be the same across all of Conference USA. Or if the Big 12 says ‘We’re going to do this,’ all of the Big 12 schools will do it. There won’t be that kind of inequity at the conference level. In the more vertical context, the recruiting advantage that a top 10 program has over a bottom 100 team is already so great that that $2,000 is not going to make a difference in a young man or woman’s decision.

From Emmert’s speech:

On scandals that have rocked the NCAA the past few months:It’s been a heck of a year. We’ve had scandals with coaches misbehaving, with players misbehaving, with boosters misbehaving, with whole academic programs misbehaving. We’ve had a tsunami of them. After about six months I sat down with my staff and asked, ‘Is this me? Am I causing this? What’s going on here.’ We have to fix that. That’s undermining and eroding everybody’s confidence it what is an amazing and remarkable American cultural tradition. We’ve got to deal with that.

On stricter Academic Progress Rate (APR) reforms that will increase requirements for schools to be eligible for postseason play:
Last year if that standard had been in place seven teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament wouldn’t have been there and eight teams that were in bowl games wouldn’t have been there. Not because they weren’t good enough on the court or the field but because their grades weren’t good enough. That is going to have a huge positive impact.

On the NCAA rulebook:We’ve got to fix these integrity questions. The rulebook right now is ridiculous. It’s 425 pages long for Division I. It has some completely unenforceable, some completely irrelevant and some completely just extraneous rules. We have to throw that stuff away and start with a completely new approach to emphasize those things that are honest-to-goodness threats to the integrity of sports. People always say, ‘What’s that?’ I say, almost always the things that your momma taught you: don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t engage in academic fraud and don’t engage in bribery. This is not complicated stuff. We’re going to focus on those things and make sure that the penalties line up aggressively around those kinds of issues and not around cell phone calls, the size of envelopes or the kind of meal you’re getting served at lunch. All of which are complex rules in our rulebook right now that don’t really have much of anything to do with anything. We need to make it that when the adults in the room in particular do something to undermine the integrity of intercollegiate athletics and amateurism, we’re going to hammer them. We’re going to hammer them hard and they need to know it.

On the misconception of money made in college athletics:We have some really big financial challenges that candidly, most people get wrong, because they think there’s too much money in the system. When in fact, if you survey university presidents — which we do all the time, those are our members — you ask them ‘What’s the biggest problem you face in athletics?’ The number one problem by far is, ‘This model isn’t financially sustainable. We cannot keep supporting it at this level. It’s going to go broke.’ It’s not, ‘It’s too much money, we don’t know what to do with all the dough.’ It is, ‘What do we do to maintain this?’ Across the board. ‘It’s too expensive, it doesn’t bring in enough revenue, it doesn’t make sense.’

On conference realignment being the result of schools trying to make up for financial losses:What conferences are trying to do is make sure that they wind up in a powerful media market so that they can maintain revenue to continue to support programs that they’re struggling to support. Keep in mind that 20 (athletic programs) had positive cash flow last year, so all the others are taking money from students, from tuition, from their own academic budget. If you looked at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the finest academic institutions in America, had to take $15 million the year before last and take it out of the academic budget and give it to the athletic department to keep the athletic department afloat. So is Berkeley happy about the new media deal with the Pac-12? Absolutely, because it will cover that hole for them. We’ve got a financial model that also has a scale problem. If you look at Division I, there are schools with budgets of $150 million – that would be (Texas), Ohio State and Alabama and we have Division I schools with $5 million budgets. That’s broken, we have to fix that part as well.

On if college sports were run like a business:If intercollegiate sports were a business, then there would be many fewer schools. Only 60 percent of FBS football teams make money. All the rest lose money. There would be a number in the state of Texas that would drop football. The ones who are successful at it, do really well at football. Every athletic department uses football to fund all or part of their other sports…..You would eliminate all the olympic sports, all the women’s sports. Baseball makes money at about four schools in America, maybe five. That’s it, most all the others lose money on it. For the most part, if it’s not on major TV outlets, you wouldn’t do it. You would drop it. Of the 11 Division I (FBS) conferences, 40 percent probably would get out of sports altogether.